Posts Tagged ‘human rights’

The UNAA Business and Human Rights Workshops build capacity to monitor and manage corporate human rights risks and impacts, providing practical guidance on how to integrate human rights considerations into everyday business practices. They provide a practical learning forum for practitioners from all stakeholder groups, on the international and domestic standards and tools available to help prevent and redress business related human rights harm. The workshops, held in partnership with Allens, are facilitated by Vanessa Zimmerman, Business and human rights expert and former Legal Advisor to the United Nations Special Representative on Business and Human Rights.

Who are the workshops for? The workshops are an essential training program for corporate responsibility and sustainability managers, investors, governance, risk and compliance managers, and corporate lawyers on the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles – the global standard of practice on business and human rights. They invite business, government and NGOs professionals wanting to learn more about business and human rights and how to apply the UN Guiding Principles in practice. Participants who attend the entire series of 6 workshops are exposed to a full package of learning on the business responsibility to respect and will be well equipped to manage business related human rights risks.

Jon Shenk’s The Island President is the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced—the literal survival of his country and everyone in it. After bringing democracy to the Maldives after thirty years of despotic rule, Nasheed is now faced with an even greater challenge: as one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of three feet in sea level would submerge the 1200 islands of the Maldives enough to make them uninhabitable.

The Island President captures Nasheed’s first year of office, culminating in his trip to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, where the film provides a rare glimpse of the political horse-trading that goes on at such a top-level global assembly. Nasheed is unusually candid about revealing his strategies—leveraging the Maldives’ underdog position as a tiny country, harnessing the power of media, and overcoming deadlocks through an appeal to unity with other developing nations. When hope fades for a written accord to be signed, Nasheed makes a stirring speech which salvages an agreement. Despite the modest size of his country, Mohamed Nasheed has become one of the leading international voices for urgent action on climate change.

On February 7, 2012, Mohamed Nasheed resigned the presidency under the threat of violence in a coup d’état perpetrated by security forces loyal to the former dictator. This film is the story of his first year in office.

Mr Nasheed, often referred to as “the Mandela of the Maldives”, has been a human rights campaigner and a global warming activist throughout his life. He will participate in a Live Video Q&A at HRAFF following The Island President screening on the 27th of May 2012 at the ACMI Cinemas.

The Indigenous people of Takuu, a tiny low-lying atoll in the South Western Pacific, have an impossible decision to make. Water is rising, and as their land starts to disappear, their way of life is under threat. But there are more immediate dangers. As they prepare for a terrifying tidal flood to rip through their community, they must ask the question: do we stay, or do we leave our homeland forever? There Once was an Island reveals the human face of climate change in the Pacific, challenging audiences everywhere to consider their own relationship to the earth and the other people on it.

6:30 pm, Friday, 20 May 2011 ACMI, Australian Centre for the Moving Image